This has been my experience with Matrix, and the message decryption problems are a dealbreaker. I hope the person who replied to you saying those have very recently been fixed is correct, but the fact that such a fundamental feature was broken for so long leaves me with little confidence in Matrix. I had this problem years ago on a Matrix community, then again maybe a year ago on a different community, and even more recently on my self-hosted instance. Don’t understand how you can push a chat platform that effectively doesn’t deliver ~1/12 messages to random users and let that issue hang around for years.

XMPP looks really interesting as an alternative. Hope that development continued at a brisk pace.

This may be a controversial inclusion, and it’s based on my relatively unsophisticated understanding of Linux. I believe the reason casual computer users hate Linux (generalizing here) is that “Linux” is not one thing.

Commercial operating systems are monoliths. Windows 11 is Windows 11. macOS is macOS. Apart from a few surface-level settings, all instances of them are the same. If you know how to use that operating system, you can go to almost any computer running that OS and start using it, just like you use the one you have at home.

“Linux” is entirely modular. There’s no single thing called “Linux.” You can pick and choose each component to build up your own customized OS from the ground up, and distros take advantage of this. I know just within my household, I have three Linux systems, and casual usage varies wildly across the three. One is a SteamDeck, which is a different kind of thing, but if I just take the two computers as an example, on one, you have an application menu in the top left where the other has an application menu in the bottom left. Also, those menus look completely different. That alone is enough to frustrate a casual user. Now take the fact that they each have different settings panels, different bundled apps, etc. and you have a recipe for making users always feel lost when moving from one system to another.

I don’t think this means you need to teach how to use every available desktop environment, window manager, or sound settings panel, but I do think it would be useful to introduce this concept as part of your curriculum. The sad part is that I think a lot of your audience will tune out at this point because they never had to know that on the commercials OSes, but I think it’s important to be forthcoming about it rather than having your audience blindsided by it.

You’re right, but part of the draw of Linux is that you have more control over your OS. An immutable distro makes that a lot harder to get at as compared to non-immutable.

I feel it’s important to note for new people that, while an immutable OS is great at keeping you from breaking your system, the way it achieves this can make some things you would want to do more difficult. In Bazzite, installing software, for example, works differently than under a typical distribution.

I’ll give the example of two pieces of software that I use regularly: 1Password and Espanso. It took a fair bit of digging to figure out how to install 1Password in a way that would preserve its tight system integration… and it still doesn’t quite work — copying a password in particular contexts just doesn’t put that password on the clipboard, while it works fine in other contexts. Espanso on the other hand just won’t work under Bazzite best I can tell. I haven’t found a way to install it at all so I’m just doing without. Oh My ZSH was also quite tricky, and I got yelled at in the Bazzite Discord for doing it the wrong way. 😅

Plenty of the software I use works fine and was easy to install: FreeTube, Kdenlive, VLC, Zen Browser… unless you count the fact that the 1Password browser integration just won’t work with Zen Browser, presumably because I haven’t found the exact right combination of Flatpak permissions plus settings that will allow it to.

All this to say, I love Bazzite for gaming and use it every day, but the moment you step outside that world and want your computer to do something a little bit differently, it’s a major headache. In the context of gaming, it’s much closer to “just works” than any other distro I’ve tried.

My brother used to work for an SEO company. They charged clients to have their web sites on directories which would improve their Google pagerank… until Google updated the algorithm to penalize sites listed in these directories. The company quickly pivoted to charging the same clients to have them removed from the directories they had just charged them to be listed in.

Oh, that’s helpful. Thank you for sharing that!

Turns out this was my goof. I was trying to set up auto-login on my user account. In doing so, I set it to automatically log in to Plasma (X11) instead of Plasma (Wayland). Odd that the default option in that dropdown is not the one you’re currently using, but 🤷‍♂️.

What I’m now trying to figure out is why I can’t set auto-login for Plasma (Wayland). The Apply button is disabled. 🤔

Thanks to everyone who shared ideas.

HDMI switcher is an interesting idea. Will it do more than just forward on the EDID? (Hope I have that right. 😅) Will it sorta translate it and push out its own EDID?

The cable is one of the two cables that previously completed the chain between the display and computer. Could it still be a problem in spite of that?

The monitor definitely is. Like I said, it was working when connected through the soundbar. It seems to be that it isn’t reporting capabilities the same way the soundbar did when connected directly to the computer.